VALA-03
Metadata
- Author: Unknown
Highlights
In the sort of life that empiricism describes, there is no escape from the ‘same dull round’ of the senses (E3). — location: 665
‘Nature has no Outline, but Imagination has’ (Ghost of Abel, pl. 1, E270). It is remarkable that for Blake what imagination gives us is above all strong definite outline, a remedy for blur. Remember what the empiricists got right: in the world of the senses there is no escape from empirical fuzz. Outline, definiteness, determinacy must be placed in the world, by the sort of creative act of which human beings are innately capable. The name of this essentially active or creative faculty is the imagination. — location: 690
Art, for both Jung and Burke, gives expression to a side of human nature that runs deeper than conscious, articulate thought, and that is inherently obscure. Blake’s conception of art exactly opposes this. The clearer things are the more I see, and seeing more is the aim of the artist. ‘All Sublimity is founded in Minute Discrimination’ (Annotations to Reynolds, E643). Art clarifies blurs, and sheds light on dark corners. — location: 713
Blake’s image of the artist is Los, the builder of cities. City building becomes a great symbol of the imagination. A city is not something in our heads: it is not a dream or a private fantasy. That is not how Blake sees the imagination. Building a city means creating something real and tangible, changing your environment, transforming nature. Artists do not withdraw to observe the natural world; rather, they make and remake the world in which we live. City building is an expression of human nature. Just as art and science are for Blake primeval states, so is the building of cities. Los’s building of Golgonooza plays such a role in Blake’s mythology because it is a permanent symbol of the human condition. The symbolic and even spiritual significance that Blake assigns to London tells us the same thing. The city builder creates something definite, determinate, particular. Such building creates order in the midst of chaos. What is more, it is a sort of seeing: it replaces blur with clarity. — location: 716
But the difference between imprisonment and liberation lies not in our external circumstances but in our perspective. It lies in the way we see things: whether we are confined to sense perception or see more with the help of the imagination. It is human nature to want more than the material world affords, and imagination is natural to humans. — location: 726
In fact, any impression of Blake as simply hostile to nature based on such isolated quotes is profoundly mistaken. Blake was someone who pushed ideas to the limit and played them off against each other in the context of his unfolding myth. His thought moves dialectically through extremes, and his statements against nature only make sense in combination with the many other things he had to say — about non-human life in particular. Blake’s positive attitude to non-human nature is arguably the most radical and far-reaching of all of his extraordinary views, though it sometimes seems hidden in plain sight. — location: 855
Blake went beyond even most supporters of animal rights and animal welfare by treating non-human animals as on a par with men: for Blake, their light burns as intensely as that of the human. Why should animal awareness be any less remarkable than our own? Is it possible that, with less neural circuitry engaged, or less information being processed (or whatever the current materialist explanation of consciousness is) the promptings of awareness need to be louder and more attention-grabbing than in our case? The idea of the scala natura is essentially only an unconscious projection on to nature of the political environment of class society. Further than this, Blake’s animism can perhaps be seen as merely a special case of a more general panpsychism: that point of view in which all matter, animate or otherwise, is seen as sentient. So, he writes to Thomas Butts on 22 August, not only does the ‘winged fly’ have ‘a brain open to heaven’, but the Thistle speaks to Blake (E721), and, in the famous lines from ‘Auguries of Innocence’, the grain of sand is seen to contain an entire world of its own (E490). To share Blake’s insight, and rescue nature, we must share his vision. — location: 879
Writing to Thomas Butts on 2 October 1800, Blake describes such a vision he received on the beach at Felpham in which he realised that ‘Each grain of Sand | Every Stone on the Land […] Are Men Seen Afar” (Letter to Thomas Butts, ll. 25-32, E712). In this supreme state, the world is alive in all of its parts, as it was for people in many pre-agricultural societies. It is only in the attenuated existence characterised as ‘Newton’s sleep’ that nature is alien and hostile; it is only in Newton’s sleep that the Gnostic antagonism to nature makes sense. Any attempt to build a habitable spiritual universe or a workable relationship with nature out of such stuff must fail. That is the fate of our world today. — location: 896
In losing his female Emanation, embodied in his mistreated three wives and three daughters, Milton has lost Eden: not because Nature is innately female, but because both are scapegoated and persecuted by the patriarchal fictions which Milton perpetuated in his epic poem. — location: 955
The garden is both a symbol and an actualisation of nature transformed by Imagination. Blake knows that the expulsion from the garden of origins, Eden, is not a loss of place or Grace, but rather a lapse of perception. Expansion and contraction of our senses is a ‘going forth and returning’ between Eternity and Time, between the One and the Many, attained by a shift in our perception of the same world. The contraction and expansion of our senses allows us to move between Time and Eternity and Blake sees, developing Swedenborg’s concept, that not only do ‘natural effects have spiritual causes’, but also that natural causes have spiritual effects: ‘A Robin Red breast in a Cage | Puts all Heaven in a Rage’ (‘Auguries of Innocence’, ll. 5-6, E490), sometimes with dreadful consequences for humans: ‘Each outcry of the hunted Hare | A fibre from the Brain does tear’ (ll. 13-14, E490). — location: 957
By contrast, Blake, in his letter to Dr Trusler asserts that ‘Nature is Imagination itself ’ (23 August 1799, E702). When Blake notes that ‘Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in me’ (E665), he is referring to the discourse of Nature as the Other, distanced and alienated by Descartian dualism and the mechanistic aspects of Newtonian physics. This is Nature as a Urizenic construct, the world that Urizen constantly creates in our psyches (Tweedy 2013; McGilchrist 2019): the dominant rational faculty arising from the lapse of perception, whose project, bred of fear, is to battle, conquer, dominate and exploit a natural world which is mistakenly perceived as a threatening ‘Outside’. Urizen’s project is fundamentally patriarchal and casts nature as a female to be fought, ravaged, occupied, colonised and commodified in the name of ‘progress’. This is, ironically, termed ‘growth’ in a capitalist regime of ‘Devouring’ consumerism. — location: 989
There is a clear sense here of Urizenic Reason as the cause, although Jung casts Reason as a ‘goddess’. Is there a sense in which this is Vala, both goddess and victim of a Urizenic mindset? In Kevin Hutchings’s Imagining Nature (2008), Hutchings refers to Vala as ‘a commodified object of masculinist desire’: — location: 1002
Let’s not forget that Vala is the ‘Veiler’ of Nature, once separated from her Zoa, Luvah, she becomes the obscure object of desire. She is the phantasm of Nature as a play of surfaces without depth — not Nature as Imagination itself, but rather an alienated Nature or Maya as illusion, as perceived by the Single Vision of a Reason-dominated mind. As the ‘Shadowy Female’ she is the shadow side of Jerusalem. As Jung says of his concept of the Shadow in the psyche, it must be integrated, as must Blake’s Spectre, not rejected. — location: 1010
The commodification and the consequent defilement and destruction of nature goes hand-in-hand with the commodification of time. In Blake’s Milton, a stronger, more detailed vision of nature as the ‘Vision of the Science of the Elohim’ (pl. 29, l. 65, E128) emerges in longer, descriptive passages on nature than Blake had ever written before. Thirty-five lyrical lines celebrate the birds, led by the lark: ‘He leads the Choir of Day!’ (pl.31, ll. 29-31, E130) performing the music of the dawn chorus and the accompanying ‘Sweet dance’ of herbs, flowers, and trees initiated by the ‘wild thyme’ (pl.31, ll. 51-53, E131). Blake’s experience of moving to Felpham from London, living at a slower place, with daily contact with the sea and the natural environment engenders a profound exploration of the Nature of Time, of Place/ Space and Imagination, all of which are, of course, embodied in Los and Enitharmon: ‘Los is called Time and Enitharmon Space’ (pl. 24, l. 68, E121). — location: 1014
Blake’s creativity returns through the triumph of Vision in a specific place and time: in Nature and the Moment. Milton, a 2000-line poem, is born out of a unique conjunction of Time, Space, Imagination and Nature redeemed from the enslavement of systems in the Blakes’ garden at Felpham. — location: 1059
When Blake says ‘Where man is not, nature is barren’ (Marriage, pl. 10, l. 68, E38), he refers to Enlightened nature: an abstract entity regulated by rigid laws that respond to observation through the ordinary senses. This aspect is the Shadowy Female, Vala, Nature, with a capital ‘N’, ‘[Lilith] Satans Wife The Goddess Nature’ (Laocoön, E273). However, the nature reflected in the vegetable world of his plates, the mountains and rivers where the Ancients with their ‘enlarged & numerous senses’ (Marriage, pl. 11, E38) could see spirits and deities, the Lilly and the Clod of Earth that teach Thel, the soft plains of America, are all part of a more visionary — location: 1335